CTJC Chanukah bulletin 2020

Love in the Blitz The greatest lost love letters of the Second World War

by Eileen Alexander Simon Goldhill The best book recommendations come from friends who are passionate about what they have read. I first heard about Eileen Alexander from my chum, Oswyn Murray, an elegant, cosmopolitan, and now retired classics professor at Oxford. Over a glass of wine, he told me how he had been contacted by a complete stranger, who had come across his name in a collection of letters (it is always helpful to have a rare name like Oswyn, he reflected). Oswyn was described as dressed like a Red Indian and rushing about with blood-thirsty glee at a house-party: did he remember meeting a Miss Alexander in 1944, when he was a small child? This chance email has led now to the full publication of the letters, and it is a quite remarkable collection, called Love in the Blitz.

Eileen Alexander was a Jewish girl, born to a wealthy family in Egypt, who came over to England in the thirties, and, in 1939, took a brilliant first at Cambridge in English. The story starts in Cambridge where she meets Gershon Ellenbogen from an orthodox Liverpool Jewish family, and, in the aftermath of a car-crash, they fall in love (they might have met at the Cambridge Jewish Society where they were both members).

The book consists of the letters Eileen wrote to Gershon, as they are Page 9